I want a new default/writing icon. Thoughts/requirements: female character in a current or enduring fandom of mine, preferably in the act of writing or drawing, although I am also considering the thought of text tattoo (text need not be English/Latin alphabet, though I would like to know what it says). Studio 60 is in my brain a bit, so I thought about Matty at his computer (an icon saying "I am eating it" would crack me up) but fairly rapidly determined that no, I really did want a woman, and none of the women from Studio 60 speak to me emphatically enough for default icon material. Then I considered Supernatural and I went poking for Ruby and spell diagrams or devil's traps or something but I think most of that is elided out. I have a reasonable shot of Anna and a blood sigil, but a) Anna makes my brain hurt and b) she looks really freaked out, which is non-ideal. I'm halfway contemplating an icon of Pam looking over her shoulder laughing at Dean about her "Jesse forever" tramp stamp, but a) I dunno what I think about using, for this purpose, ink that outlived
its purpose, and b) I'm not that big a Pam girl. I remembered Lady Gaga has a ton of ink, but curiously the cinematography in her videos doesn't fetishize it. (For instance, I am not sure I will ever figure out what she has on her left shoulder.) I am most interested on the long German text she has on her inner arm, partly because I'm mostly likely to get it in frame with her face, and partly because of what that text is--a Rainer Maria Rilke quote, "In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?"
Okay, so far, images I'm considering (that I would probably want to add text to)--
http://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/images/jesseforever.jpghttp://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/images/germantat.jpghttp://jmtorres.dreamhosters.com/images/recliningtat.jpgAny thoughts on other characters that might suit my criteria, or other places to find images of the strong contenders that might suit my criteria?
All of which is in aid of (because one must have the appropriate icon for the post):
I feel like my brain is roiling with epic WIPs lately and I want to note them all (and give anyone who wants opportunity to um, encourage anything they like).
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Vorkosigan 60, which really ought to get a proper working title for the story as opposed to the 'verse. I went back looking for records of ever talking about this, and I don't think I managed to properly explain it to my journal any time in the three years I've had the bunny. See, back in... early 2007, I think, is when I broke and let
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niqaeli show me Sorkin's meta RPF crack, there were odd bits about how Danny ran the show like, um, the whole machiavellian control freak manipulation of the focus group data to make Matt start fighting back about politics in his writing, and the exchange regarding intermittent power outages caused by a palm tree:
Danny: How much do I wanna know about this?
Cal: As little as possible.
Danny: 'kay.
So I had this thought that had me literally on the floor laughing, and if I remember right
niqaeli ended right there with me while the boys of the household sort of... eyebrowed at us. That thought was that
Matt and Danny would be good ImpSec officers.That is basic concept of the fusion. Details have sorted out thusly: Danny's Barrayaran, a captain, in Galactic Affairs. He trains up agents to work as responsibly as if there is no safety net by attempting to convince them he is not actually paying attention to anything they do--so they'll get shit done because if they don't, it's not getting done. Illyan threw him mediocre agents to sharpen up in this manner. There's a fair number of agents who recall Captain Tripp with... fond terror. Matt is Komarran, Danny went to college on Komarr, met him, and sort of dragged him home. Matt is Danny's pet analyst and his specialty is spotting domestic assassination attempts using galactic resources. He sort of chews on invisible problems from both ends and then says "There, that shipment of phlebotinum, so and so's using that for this plot." It's a... heavily intuitive pattern recognition thing. He couldn't tell you how he picks out what's important, but once he's at the conclusion, he can point to all the data points that got him there, and he's right. It relies hugely on having reams of accurate, seemingly trivial data. The first time he gets really fouled up is circa Civil Campaign, because one of the reports he mines regularly for currents in high Vor society is Byerly's, and Byerly started falsifying/leaving many things out of his reports. Not that Dono was a mystery that would have concerned Matt much, just that Byerly's reports got
sparse while he was covering for Dono.
There's two main plot threads to the story I'm writing--one is that Matt and Danny get split up, which neither of them copes with well. Illyan had some patience for their special partnership but management has recently changed at ImpSec, and not all the personnel details came to Allegre intact. And also: without yet knowing why he's off (Dono not yet revealed, the hole in the data not yet obvious) Matt has been off, so the apparent efficacy of his and Danny's partnership is tarnished. So Matt's getting transferred and Danny's trying to pull strings to get him back, which is... you don't go around department heads in ImpSec, really, you don't. You most certainly do not go to the retired former head of ImpSec and ask for a social introduction to a potential patron who could somehow intervene on your behalf with
the Emperor, because that's who you have to go to if you're going over the current head of ImpSec. You don't do any of that. Unless you're Danny Tripp and completely co-dependent to the point that it uh, interferes with your judgement.
The other main plot thread is the mystery that Matt's trying to unravel with no good sense of what pieces he's missing. It centers on Harriet Vorhayes, née Vorrutyer (which is part of the reason Byerly's inaccurate reports are so crucial here; he's stopped reporting family gossip). Matty has been inappropriately hung up on the married Vor lady for a long time; not involved, just, Danny really wishes he would... not attempt to socialize with her. So while Danny indulges Matt's requests for more data about her, because Matt's hunches pan out nine times out of ten, Danny is also quietly headdesking about stalking goddamn Harriet of all people. (Harriet's family history is... of import, so out of not spoiling the nature of the plot Matt uncovers, I will not go into it here.)
The eventual intersection of the Harriet mystery and Danny trying to climb the Vor for a patron lands squarely on Gregor being Gregor at them. Gregor being quietly, intensely Imperial is quite possibly my favorite thing in the entire Vorkosigan universe, so naturally that's where the whole story I'm writing is aimed at. So that's what Vorkosigan 60's about. Heh.
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The Haunting: A Comedy of Spirit is, approximately, an AU of season 6 of SG-1. (This is the season when Daniel was dead.) In this story, ascended Daniel just never leaves Jack alone. Jack is bitchy about this, Sam and Teal'c are concerned for Jack's sanity, Skaara would like to not have to be the one to break it to Jack that Jack and Daniel are kind of dating, and somehow Jonas ends up obsessed with vampires. I've written a chapter and a half and about two thirds of the outline, and that much story is
twelve thousand words, seriously, what, how. I posted the
first chapter two years ago, and I really would like to finish it. I started rewatching season six with my brother toward this end.
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Kryptonian Neal, who needs a better working title. This is a White Collar/DCU fusion inspired by
this image of Matt Bomer in Clark Kent glasses and some of Neal's more alien behavior--seriously, every time I watch the scene at Maria's house in "Book of Hours," where she leans in and he doesn't kiss her for like, two minutes, and in fact does not kiss her at all in that scene, despite her continually leaning right into his space--yeah, this is clearly Kryptonian touch taboo at work. *nods vigorously* There are two relevant entries where I discuss this story:
a snippet about Neal's Kryptonian criminal record and
a solicitation of which parts of DCU I should draw on.
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Rubyverse, my AU of season 4 of Supernatural, which is actually
two fucking epic stories, paired:
The first is primarily about Sam and Ruby's summer vacation. Its working title is something along the incredibly clichéd lines of "To Hell and Back" because the primary AU feature of this part of the story is that Ruby actually assists Sam in attempts to get Dean back from hell, up to and including storming hell via the devil's gate in Wyoming. They also do other dumb shit like call up the crossroads demon and fail to deal (almost exactly as shown in canon)
and call up the Trickster and ask him to turn back the clock again. But the main feature is the trip to hell--the preparation for it, because they have to get the colt from Crowley to open the gate, and because it's a long journey requiring provisioning (I think they spend nine months under hill, which works out to like, two and a half days topside) as Sam can't eat or drink anything he didn't bring in with him, or he'll end up trapped there. Ruby leaves her body topside and in hell becomes apparent as the image of how she was when she died, which leads to interesting bits of backstory coming out (which conflict with other parts of backstory she tells to other people at other times, unless you know what I know, and you won't, because the one POV that will
not be present in this story is Ruby's). Ruby feeds Sam a metric fuckton of her own blood in hell, to the point that he can black-eye voluntarily, in an effort to allow him to pass as demon to casual inspection, so they can travel in hell without getting caught. (Sam remains altered by this after they get out, and Dean gets out, much to Dean's dismay; however, the
manner of blood-drinking matters a lot, and this Sam only drank Ruby's freely offered blood: he didn't slaughter unwilling demons or kill a nurse or even take of Ruby's unconscious host, because Ruby left her body topside and fed Sam direct from herself in hell. He was also not trying to gain the strength to control or kill demons, and intent matters. So Sam ends up with an uncomfortable amount of power that is not tainted the same way it is in canon.) They eventually do not break Dean out because Sam snaps and busts a few hundred damned, tortured souls out and draws the attention of who Ruby terms "the scary motherfuckers": fallen angels, of whom there are not that many, but they run hell, and really the only thing to do is flee. I know this story is told out of order and I'm playing with something as simple as the framing device of telling Dean what happened while he was down, interspersed with a short run of events immediately after they get him back (Ruby fucking with Dean, the process of figuring out who Castiel is, and Castiel meeting Ruby and being extremely baffled by her, because interrogation suggests that not only is she trying to prevent the apocalypse, she has feasible plans for doing so). The ending is where Sam and Dean meet Ruby-who-is-not-Ruby: the coma girl woke up, and Ruby vacated her body.
The second part is going by the working tile of "Janie, and Other Lost Lambs," and is about, among other things, just-awoken amnesiac coma girl, who goes by Janie, as dubbed by Ruby, short for Jane Doe. Janie makes a go of life away from the Winchesters and the apocalypse while Ruby rides a proper corpse (male, just to mess with Sam and Dean's heads). But Janie... she can't remember anything about her own life at this point, but she remember parts of what Ruby did in her body (so most of part 1, except for the actual in-hell bits, during which comatose Janie was left in Bobby's care, I'm pretty sure). And she ends up calling Ruby, because Ruby is all she knows. Eventually demons hunt Janie down and try to take her apart to figure out what the fuck Ruby is doing (not unlike what happened to Jimmy Novak), and when the boys and Ruby ride to her rescue, Ruby ends up riding Janie again on a more permanent basis, with permission and certain protections. Janie gets more involved in Ruby's plan to stop the apocalypse, which at this point involves fucking with the seal count to buy time. I have a handful of seals I know they mess with that I swear are not all designed to get certain rarepairs I want (Ruby/Cas, Janie/Jo, Cas/Janie, what have you...) and there is ongoing back and forth between Ruby and Cas about how possession functions (and the fact that Jimmy is so totally Cas's sub) and how seals are constructed and deconstructed. Janie's pre-coma identity is eventually determined, and it's relevant, but mostly as a thing Janie gives up when Ruby offers her the out again and Janie chooses to stick around to be part of the fight instead. Ruby makes the guys train Janie to fight in case Ruby herself is ever out of commission, which becomes useful sooner than Ruby was expecting when they need a Trickster and Gabriel's reaction to the curiosity that is the Ruby/Janie partnership is to poke hard and damage Ruby in the process. Crowley pops up again. Among my primary clusterfuck (Ruby, Janie, Sam, Dean, Cas and Jimmy) blood and sex get exchanged in various lines. Tattoos are acquired. There is a too clever plan about Lilith, and a less clever back-up plan that Ruby is not admitting to herself she is setting in motion, although Cas and Janie back her on it. There is noncon snuggling. Many people well-meaningly ask, with varying degrees of tact, Janie if she's okay being Ruby's host. The answer sort of fluctuates, but Janie chooses Ruby over other options again, and again, and again. Ruby pushes her, but Ruby offers her the out, too, because it's important that Janie choose--particularly because Ruby is a demon, and there are things she
can't choose, and needs Janie to agree to choose for her. I am sort of dancing around not blowing the ending on this one, so I will sum up thematically instead: it's about the limits of free will and the power of choice.
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*sits back and stares at screen* I've been working on that for four hours, and by the way, those are only the
epic stories in my head. I have a ton of smaller bunnies, up to and including the
wtf how did I end up with this one Misha/Dean twitterfic. I also have plans this weekend to bang through my prompts post, though I have decided for the sake of getting things flowing that for those prompts I will write what I'm inspired to write and not worry about whether it fits the prompt exactly or might not be what the prompter intended. I feel kind of guilty about it, but it
wasn't a secret santa prompt collection and the point
was to get me writing, so get me writing we'll do.
And now it might be time to sleep.
